Venturi's Voice: Technology | Leadership | Staffing | Career | Innovation

Richard is the Head of Digital Retail at Answer Digital Fast approaching his 10th year at Answer Digital, Richard is very passionate about all things agile. He’s an agile project manager and scrum master who has worked in a variety of industries and sectors. He has recently been working closely with the retail sector helping companies deliver agile change projects and programs and facilitating scalable initiatives.

Lucas is the CTO at Lyst Lucas is an experienced Internet Tech and Product Head. He has a strong background in start-ups, acquisitions, and intrapreneurial leadership for large organizations. He is skilled in management, Software as a Service (SaaS), product development, big data, agile, and intellectual property.

Joshua is a Senior Technical Consultant at Computer ConQuest and a co-host of the Getting Apps Done podcast. At 14 Josh could boast he owned the most powerful computer in town. He owned a Pentium 166 with 8mb of RAM. It was at this point he immediately fell in love with computer and programming. After a lot of trial and error, teaching himself to code, Josh built a career for himself as a software developer. He’s now got so many coding languages under his belt he can’t fit them all on his CV. He’s now teaching others how to become software developers and building communities to support individuals at every point of their coding journey.

Dmitri is the Head of DevOps at LoveHoliday. Dmitri is interested in exploring Google Cloud, Kubernetes, building scalable distributed systems and cloud-native tech. Before heading up DevOps at Loveholidays, Dmitri worked at IBM Watson Health and holds patents from his time there. Check out Dmitri’s blog at deploy.live: https://deploy.live/

Alex is the CEO of Dovetail Lab Alex is an experienced company director, entrepreneur and project manager. She is the Co-Founder and CEO of Dovetail Lab, a software company that has developed a blockchain platform to pioneer better information sharing in healthcare by giving patients control of their data. A majority stake in Dovetail has recently been acquired by EMIS Group plc, an AIM-listed health technology company that currently provides clinical systems to approximately 60% of GPs in the UK.

Juha is the engineering lead at Transferwise. Juha is a Computer Science graduate who has spent the past 20 years working in IT and the last 30 programming. He spent the first decade of his career building a consultancy in Finland which in time brought him to the UK and Germany. In this period Juha learned most of his programming and project management skills. Ever since then he’s been doing more management and CTO type roles in different companies. His varied career has seen him work in startups, become a member of a few corporate innovation units and now he’s an engineering lead at Transfer Wise which is a London based Fintech unicorn. But he’d call it a double unicorn because it's actually profitable. At TransferWise Juha leads 6 teams that are focused around the companies business customers. Transferwise was traditionally a consumer-focused company but in the last few years, they’ve started focusing on what their business customers would need. Juha’s team is working on all the features necess

Ronald is the VP of Product at FACEIT. Ronald always wanted to work in the video game industry but he started his career at Spotify. He began his professional life as a project manager but as he progressed his role morphed into the product manager he is now. Ronald is currently VP of Product at FACEIT which is the leading competitive gaming platform. FACEIT allows players to easily play in tournaments and leagues for virtual and real-world prizes through automated tournament management and matchmaking technology.

Robert is the Founder of Kindaba and the CEO at HeySummit Ever since he was young Robert has enjoyed undertaking and building projects. He found creating new businesses and processes far more rewarding than working as a small cog in a large company. His passion for projects began after university. He started a non-profit project where he and 4 friends worked and lived in a converted school bus. They drove around America and made short documentary films about people doing good things in the country. He did this because he wanted a project that would throw him in the deep end of the working world and give him a whole bunch of skills that he could add to his CV. Such as large-scale logistics, planning, how to manage a team, and how to fundraise. After this Robert came back to the UK and started building software programs for a university for a few years. Kindaba started from a personal pain point which was the difficulty of communicating and sharing images with less tech-savvy family members. He started

Leon is the Founder and CPO/CSO at Elsewhen When he began his career Leon saw Software Engineering as a side-project. He finished an arts degree and started creating generative art using computers. This sparked his interest in software, he rejected an arts master and pivoted into a career where he could solve real-world problems. As a software engineer Leon wanted to bring together the disparate aspects of product development and business and let business owners gain more control of their product journey. So he started Elsewhen. Find out more about Elsewhen here: http://bit.ly/elsepod1

Nitzan is a Senior Salesforce Systems Manager & Information Security Lead at The Challenge Before working with Salesforce Nitzan worked as a software developer and project manager for various companies, including outdoor advertising, several software houses, and a stock market trading training company. Most of her career has been based around the database application space and that made the transition to Salesforce the most logical step. Nitzan started her Salesforce career volunteering for a charity. She was eager to work more closely with the platform and found a lot of support, knowledge, and careers advice in the Salesforce community. She’s also a mentor and came on the show to chat about her community work, volunteering and mentoring with Salesforce.

Chris is the VP of People & Culture at Zenjob Living in Berlin since 2012, Chris has seen the cities tech startup scene change massively. He moved with this wife to Berlin to get out of his comfort zone and hasn’t looked back since. He started his career at Soundcloud and this was where he cut his teeth in recruitment and HR. From there Chris moved N26 as their Director of Employee Experience before finally moving to Zenjob where he’s now the VP of people & culture.

Hansel is the VP of Engineering at Touch Surgery 5 billion people don’t have access to safe surgery. Changing that statistic is Touch Surgery’s mission. Hansel is helping the company achieve this goal through his role as the VP of Engineering. Hansel builds and trains teams of developers and provides them with everything they need to do their jobs. He leads an engineering team of 30+ people which is responsible for building scalable, automatically testable, and easily deployable platforms for surgical education and AI-driven analysis of surgical video.

Aris is the CEO & Co-Founder at Gutsy Ninja For the last 10 years, Aris has been working as an agile delivery manager. He especially enjoys contracting roles within organisations that help drive software delivery, assist and improve Agile processes and techniques such as Scrum Master and Agile Coaching initiatives. Having been convinced of the Agile mindset many years ago, Aris took the opportunity to investigate ways of bringing the customer's voice closer to the overall process. Gutsy Ninja is now helping companies understand their customers, increase conversion and find opportunities with our User Research consultancy.

Vlasios is the Chief Data Officer at Argus Media. With a Ph.D. in informatics, Vlasios started his career working in academia. His Ph.D. led him to specialise in managing data sets over geographical space and time. When he left university he worked on several consultancy projects and could boast that the UK government was a client. After this Vlasios spent some time setting up his own company where he successfully commercialised a lot of the research he did over his academic career. From there he worked in the banking sector where he set up a commercial banks data science capabilities and now he’s at Argus Media as their first Chief Data Officer.

Jason is the development manager at Connells Group Jason is a digital technology manager with over 10 years’ experience developing and delivering digital platforms. He’s delivered everything from simple PHP Facebook applications through to complex asset management systems on Umbraco. During his career, in addition to development and project delivery, he has built and managed digital teams of up to 15 people and worked with onshore and offshore external production houses. He’s introduced creative technology into the agencies he has joined, developed and implemented technical processes, and introduced agile ways of working.

Christian is the CTO at DCMN With 20+ as a software developer, Christian started coding when he was 16. Drawn to the allure of entrepreneur life he started his first company when he was 17. His company provided a hosting service to businesses. He found that this was a nice niche he could exploit at the time that paid for Christian’s studies. When he finished studying physics he started a second company in Berlin where he created a video recruiting interview software. After this, he worked at SAP for a while before starting yet another company dealing in mobile advertising. He sold that two years ago to DCMN which is where he’s serving as the CTO right now.

Sophie is the Managing Director at Mercedes-Benz.io Although Sophie isn’t a super technical individual (by her own admission) she has always worked in and managed IT teams. A self-professed Daimler child, she started her working life there as an intern then moved into a trainee position. From there, Sophie always found herself working in IT projects. For Sophie, IT is always one part of a larger project. She is equally comfortable in defining big system landscapes and a projects overall architecture as she is at integrating people and thinking creatively about projects.

Charlie is the Senior Technical Recruiter and Ben is the Group CTO at GfK. GfK harnesses big-data on consumers and brands to provide multi-national clients with actionable intelligence that helps inform their strategies and shapes markets. GfK Tech is responsible for the entire life cycle of global market research applications. They develop applications for internal and external customers to enable big data. They apply modern technology and proven practices to solve problems around big data storage, big data processing, machine learning, and complex data visualisation. We build innovative greenfield cloud-native data analytics products. Ben Ben is A passionate, customer and delivery focused global, digital technology leader with broad industry experience across media, financial services and retail as well as a top-tier consultancy foundation. Charlie Charlie is responsible for managing hiring across GfK. He sources and places candidates in Architecture, Development, DevOps, Data Science, QA & UX/UI

Marco is the VP of Engineering at Ambie Ambie is a smarter way for businesses to manage their background music. By combining music experts with smart and simple tech, we help hundreds of businesses around the world increase efficiency while creating the perfect atmosphere, using music. Ambie curates playlists for businesses. Their mission is to deliver the right music at the right time to create the mood the business owner expects or what the business owner needs.

Leanne is the IT Digital Services Director at Heathrow Airport A highly accomplished and resilient IT Director, Leanne has global experience in leading the development and execution of IT Strategies to support business transformation. Her success is underpinned by her ability to weave together ideas and the right talent and get tangible deliverable done. Leanne is known completing transformation projects and she makes sure that everyone involved understands the purpose of the transformation and that they have fun when they’re doing it.